Analytics

Life Verse

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39

and Technology Musings

~Creating Nozbe Templates

Here’s another quick tip on using Nozbe. If you are like me, you have projects at work that are very similar. If you’re scratching your head, let me give you an example.

I manage a computer training center, and have two major types of projects that comprise the greater part of my work, in addition to staff supervision. The first involves preparing a computer lab with the necessary software installation and connectivity, along with preparing an instructor and providing course materials and exercises for the class. The second type includes all of the above, but adds course development to the mix. While things can and do change for each project, the basics tasks are always the same.

Here’s an example list of tasks.

Post Training Reporting and Critique

Deliver Training to Users

Announce Ready

Conduct Dry Run for Instructor Prep & Testing

Test Application

Install or Deploy Application

Schedule Lab Setup & Testing if needed

Schedule and Confirm Participants

Request Ticket for Addons or Installs Needed for lab setup

Determine Lab Prep Needs

Schedule Lab

Create Training Schedule

Reproduce Final Training Materials

Review Training Materials for Final Approval

Develop Training Materials

Schedule any necessary prerequisite training

Determine Computer Skills of Identified Users

Identify Users

Determine Training Responsibilities

Review Project Schedule

Review Training Plan

Review Communication Plan

Meet with Project Manager

Now it would obviously take some time to enter all of these tasks into a new project. But here is where Nozbe’s add multiple actions feature comes in. This feature is available when you click the “New Action” button, and can be accessed by clicking the link entitled, “add more actions at once”. You will then see a box in which to add your actions, one per line, as shown below. You can even add parameters like contexts (see the context @CTC at the end of my actions), due dates, etc.

Adding Multiple Tasks to a Nozbe Project

So the next question might be, do I have to type all of these actions each time. The answer is no. While there really is no Nozbe template feature at present, I found a way to make this process easy. I created a project called “Project Templates” and put each unique list of actions in a note in this project, labeling it appropriately. Then, whenever I need the list of actions, I simply open the appropriate note, Select All and Copy, and then Paste the list into the add multiple actions box, to add the list into the new project.

You can have an unlimited number of notes attached to your Project Template, so you can create as many lists as you need. Its just a matter of opening the note, and copy paste. I use this time saver all the time and it is a simple and elegant solution. Just leave a comment if you have any questions, and thanks for reading, John.